Dragline excavator
large vehicle used for lifting, especially in the process of mining: basically an excavator which drags its bucket to fill it
A dragline excavator is a heavy-duty excavator used in civil engineering and surface mining. It was invented in 1904, and presented an immediate challenge to the steam shovel and its diesel and electric powered descendant, the power shovel. Much more efficient than even the largest of the latter, it enjoyed a heyday in extreme size for most of the 20th century, first becoming challenged by more efficient rotary excavators in the 1950s, then superseded by them from the upper end from the 1970s onward.
The largest ever walking dragline was Big Muskie, a Bucyrus-Erie 4250-W put online in 1969 that swung a 220 yd3 (170 m3), 295-metric ton (325 short ton) capacity bucket, had a 310 feet (94 m) boom, and weighed 12,247 metric tons (13,500 short tons).
The largest walking dragline produced as of 2014 was Joy Global’s digital AC drive control P&H 9020XPC, which has a bucket capacity of 110–160 yd3 (84–122 m3) and boom lengths ranging from 325–425 ft (99–130 m); working weights vary between 7,539 and 8,002 tons.
Types
Draglines fall into two broad categories: those that are based on standard, lifting cranes, and the heavy units which have to be built on-site. Most crawler cranes, with an added winch drum on the front, can act as a dragline. These units (like other cranes) are designed to be temporarily dismantled and transported over the road on flatbed trailers. Draglines used in most civil engineering are of this smaller, crane type. These are used for road construction, port construction, pond and canal dredging, and as pile driving rigs.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q237122. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1904, 1969 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dragline excavator” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.